Bob Dylan Continues to be a Man of Constant Innovation in Columbus

The most important thing to keep in mind when attending a Bob Dylan concert is that Bob Dylan sounds bad live because he’s a genius. On Tuesday, Nov. 3, I took this theory to the Lifestyle Communities Pavilion in Columbus, OH, and genuinely enjoyed Dylan’s show.

After the two-and-a-half hour car ride to Columbus, I slipped my way past droves of middle-aged, slightly tipsy Ohioans to get a good view of the man and his band. Later on in the show, one such middle-aged, very tipsy woman kept bopping into me — causing me to move to a location with an even better view of Dylan and the band.

Dylan emanated suave, old-man cool in his black top hat, black sailor jacket and sleek black pants. His backing band seemed to be composed entirely of 30-something, pony-tailed white men in black button-down shirts. Although each band member was quite obviously a talented musician in his own right, the band amounted to accompanists — mere accessories to the visionary musical mind of Bob Dylan.

Tenth grade was the peak of my extreme, unhealthy Bob Dylan obsession, in which I had his lyrics swimming around in my head throughout the day, occasionally writing them down in my class notebooks to see what they looked like on paper. I would then come home from school to devote hours at a time to listening to Dylan’s songs and learning to play them on the guitar, to the detriment of homework and sleep. I wanted to play his songs just as Dylan played them, so I even bought a harmonica rack and several harmonicas in the key of whichever song I wanted to sing.

During this time, I read Chronicles, Volume 1, a disjointed collection of his memoirs. The narrative roams and rambles over apparently unconnected periods of Dylan’s career — from the early ’60s when Dylan first started writing songs and struggled to land gigs in small Greenwich Village folk clubs, then skipping around in time to when he recorded New Morning in 1970, then to the late ’80s, when he spent time developing new ways to strum his guitar.

From many perspectives, the memoir’s loose focus, stream-of-consciousness voice and refusal to highlight the most historically significant or exciting events count as poor writing. But what I found so cool about Dylan’s narrative voice and style was that they communicated the way Dylan’s mind works.

Dylan describes a point in 1987, triggered by a hand injury, in which he began to rethink his live show. He realized, “The public had been fed a steady diet of my complete recordings on disc for years, but my live performances never seemed to capture the inner spirit of the songs — had failed to put the spin on them. The intimacy, among a lot of other things, was gone. For the listeners, it must have been like going through deserted orchards and dead grass.”

Instinctively, Dylan began a process of reworking and even recreating his old songs. He describes a new obsession that overtook him, in which he could not imagine playing another live show unless he replaced his old style with something new. He wanted to play the same songs as if they were new creations.

To avoid a kind of creative death, Dylan compulsively reconstructed the basic elements of his songs. He wrote: “I became aware of a certain set of dynamic principles by which my performances could be transformed. By combining certain elements of technique which ignite each other I could shift the levels of perception, time-frame structures and systems of rhythm which would give my songs a brighter countenance, call them up from the grave — stretch out the stiffness in their bodies and straighten them out.”

This is the very reason why audiences are often left unsatisfied at his shows: Dylan does not attempt to sound like one of his original records, he attempts to play the songs as if they were unheard and brand new. Dylan’s mind demands constant revision, and to play his songs the same way again and again clashes with his creative instincts.

Dylan further writes of his dissatisfaction with the audience members who wanted him to sound like his old self: “They came to stare and not participate. That was okay, but the kind of crowd that would have to find me would be the crowd who didn’t know what yesterday was.”

On Tuesday night, Dylan opened the show with “Gonna Change My Way of Thinking,” a song from his 1979 born-again Christian album Slow Train Coming. Next, he jumped a decade and played “Shooting Star” from his 1989 album Oh, Mercy.

Dylan’s third song leapt two decades ahead: “Beyond Here Lies Nothin’” from his most recent album released last summer, Together Through Life. He continued to skip around his almost five-decade catalog of over 32 major studio albums — and that number doesn’t even include live albums, compilations or official bootlegs.

Predictably, Dylan chose to concentrate the set on his latest studio albums — Love and Theft (2001), Modern Times (2006) and Together Through Life (2009) — which all feature the slick sound of a blues band.

But to my surprise and excitement, Dylan also focused on his 1965 classic pop album Highway 61 Revisited, playing “Desolation Row,” “Highway 61 Revisited,” “Ballad of a Thin Man” and perhaps his biggest hit, “Like a Rolling Stone.”

The highlight of the set for me was “Ballad Of A Thin Man,” in which Dylan stood at the center of the stage with only a microphone, raising his arms as his band played the familiar melodic hook. As Dylan sang, the lights from below took on a more active presence, casting Dylan’s enormous shadow onto the back of the stage, along with much smaller shadows of the band. The theatrical effect reminded me of the scene in I’m Not There, in which Cate Blanchett captures Dylan’s larger-than-life stage mystique to the tune of “Ballad of a Thin Man.”

Although Dylan alternated between playing keyboard, electric guitar, steel guitar and using only a microphone, every song, no matter which instruments or tone the original version contained, was played with the backing band. Because the band gave each song an electrified bluesy feel, the show was surprisingly coherent considering the plethora of musical styles and material in the set.

Dylan’s musical genius derives from his unwillingness to be pigeonholed to any one style, genre, technique or voice. His performances contain the same imperative of experimentation and growth. That’s why his songs are sometimes hardly recognizable when played live, and why audience members sometimes react negatively. But it’s also why he’s so amazing — and why seeing him live is an unexpected and exciting experience.